“Honey, I shrunk the database”: footprint, mobility, and beyond

The small-scale mobile computing market (palmtops, handhelds, smartphones, smartcards, etc.) is showing the most explosive growth in the history of computing. Within the last year, most database vendors have announced plans to build “small footprint” versions of their DBMS products to run on these small and mobile platforms. What are the real database systems issues? What are the likely markets? What are the challenges, and the dangers? Every specific vendor seems to have a different answer to these questions. They all agree on only one thing: there is a tremendous opportunity here. Our motivation for this panel is to get a number of the central decision-makers into a room and debate the issues.